Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

What most of these comments are missing is the attempt at standardization and unification.

There are a lot of comments that people need X feature in order to switch to Y editor. While that may be true and your particular workflow requires certain features, what is overlooked is the survival pressure for editors.

It appears that our industry is moving towards adoption, sometimes mandatory, of AI coding agents. Regardless of your feelings on the topic, having good tooling to support this effort comes down to: switching costs, compatibility with existing editors, and a strong ecosystem of third party extensions.

While Cursor/Windsurf jumped the gun on bespoke editor integrations with LLMs - the adoption of MCP and other SDKs for coding agents means it's plug and play. The full feature set will be in every editor connected to every agent.

I think Zed wins on having the lowest switching costs for most developers. Paying down generic solutions like Agent Client Protocol (AC) now is a good strategy. It took multiple parties coming together for us to get TLS, OAuth 2.0, and ECMAScript.

I don't see why most editors should behave like hand crafted musical instruments when in reality they are much more akin to high quality knives in a kitchen (sure you have your favorite knife set and bring it from job to job, but at the end of the day you can be just as productive with a different knife when necessary).

> I don't see why most editors should behave like hand crafted musical instruments when in reality they are much more akin to high quality knives in a kitchen (sure you have your favorite knife set and bring it from job to job, but at the end of the day you can be just as productive with a different knife when necessary).

This is such a poor analogy. Yes, a good chef can make do with a different knife, but there is a reason why chefs pay for significantly higher quality knives, keep them sharpened, and treat them with diligence and care, than other kitchen tools. A blunt knife can actually be dangerous. Consequently, a lot of chefs buy knives that are effectively hand crafted / forged knives out of this relentless pursuit of quality.

> What most of these comments are missing is the attempt at standardization and unification.

> While that may be true and your particular workflow requires certain features, what is overlooked is the survival pressure for editors.

I think your general perception is not something I agree with. I want to use software I enjoy using. Programming is a creative exercise for me, and I want to use the tools I enjoy. If a tool is not enjoyable to use, I do not want to use it. Sometimes, productivity does increase enjoyment, but sometimes it doesn't. For example, arguably I would have been more productive in my Java days if I used Eclipse, but because the editor was so bad, I preferred to learn the APIs myself and use Sublime Text instead.

I also don't think I'm sympathetic to the survival of any particular editor. Software comes and goes, and sustainably built business models will prevail. All of the AI-first editors hinge on this being the right iteration of this technology, and we simply do not have a long enough timeframe or context to know if this is truly the best way to write code using AI. MCP/ACP, whatever else might be the best strategy for now, but I think it's too early for anyone to suggest that we've come to the right conclusion forever.

As someone who is in the position to see what the next really disruptive innovation is, you're quite right that there exist much, much better ways to write and collaborate on code. Flying leaps of innovation to Zed's tiny shuffle-steps.

What tools or tech are you referring to?